Customer Reviews

Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Previous reviewers have noted that the adventure game-play in this game is non-existant. They are correct. There aren't any puzzles or strange problems that need solving, no pixel hunting. It takes a little while to become accustomed to the interface. The control system is funky and involves a lot of keyboard hot keys and little mouse manuevering. In that respect, it is different from the earlier Larry games. I originally disliked it, but it grew on me.

It's better to compare the style of this game to "Dead Or Alive Beach volleyball." A lot of shots of lucious co-eds and a couple of mini-games such as coin tossing, running away from various angry fathers, Deportation employees etc. It is also in no way shape or form, hard. Even the arcade sequences have the option of being passed over after losing about 5 times. For me, this was fine, because this kind of thing easily annoys and bores me.

And now to the game's strong point, its hilarious plotting. The characters are very well developed and like an interactive "National Lampoon" spoof, you run into all kinds of jokes just navigating the game's many locations. A lot of entertainment alone lies in eavesdropping on the various characters hanging around the campus. For instance, in the library there is a guy that is getting charged about two hundred dollars late fees for checking out 20 some magazines all on the subject of "tea-bagging".

The girls all have their various quirks and I found myself playing the conversation mini-game over and over again just to roll my mouse over the red pellets and hear all the outrageous, tacky and downright taste-less things that Larry ends up saying when he makes a mistake and hits a red pellet. (Each pellet he hits changes the conversation. If he hits the green ones, he'll be nice.) I found myself laughing out loud.

The girls you're chasing after are hilarious. I don't if I said that already, but I'll say it again. They range from a "band geek" to a foreign exchange student who speaks hilariously broken English, and there are tons of them. I'm thinking at least 12.

I have one final point to touch on. It goes with the maturity level of this game. This game is much more risque than the originals. It features frequent bad language and often goes beyond simply "hinting" at things. And while the game is loading, you are often presented with actual photographs of scantily clad women. Sometimes, I felt like I was flipping through play-boy and being a girl, I felt like I shouldn't be playing this.

But this is a really fun game. I actually just got done playing it. I played for about 4 hours because it's also mildly addictive and a great way to waste time.

So don't just play the game to beat it, because that's not where the fun is situated. Play around with it, walk around campus and see the sights.

Well, I bought the game yesterday and played it quite a few hours into the night. The downside was my sucky Intel graphics card barely keeps the screen clear arter the first hour or two. The game did warn me about that beforehand. I tried playing it in a computer window rather than full screen but that lagged it like crazy.
Soooooo, for those of you WITH a decent graphics card, here's my overall report.
The mini-games in the overall game itself fall into one of five types:
1) The conversation game where your game character is a sperm that you have to move around vertically to grab happy faces for Larry to say something nice, while avoiding the red icons that either make him say something stupid or make him more drunk, making the control of the sperm near impossible. This, in my opinion is the most frustrating of the games.
2) The dancing/trampoline game where 'up', 'down', 'left'', 'right', and 'button' icons skim across the bottom of your screen and you have to hit those keys ('button' being the enter/return key), in the right order at the right time to win the competition and impress your opponent to gain confidence for Larry (and sometimes money).
3) The bartending game is much like the previous one only you have the left, right, up, and down icons on the screen in four circles and you have to hit them when they light up.
4) The 'quarters' game which, for veteran college residents, plays just like Quarters at your local kegger. I suggest holding the quarter just below the opponents' neck level and toward the left edge of the glass.

5) Anyone remember the old video game 'Tapper'? Well, it's in this game too. You'll either be serving drinks at a bar, handing out flyers, or feeding monkey chow to the monkeys... quite challenging.
There are a LOT of flashback jokes throughout the game. The most disturbing of which being Larry's fairy godmother looking like Ron Jeremy (no, it's not his voice).

There are several strip versions of most of the games; however, a 'censored' sign covers up the privates. You have to go through all of the game before the option of getting rid of those signs is given to you, and even then, you have to get 269 secret tokens in order to activate it.

If any of the missions start getting on your nerves, you can 'wimp out' which takes 4 to 6 tokens away from your stash but it allows you to go to the next mission. In my opinion, of all of Larry's conquests, Morgan is the toughest group of missions.

In Larry's Black Book, you'll find his current objectives, conquests, and purchased wardrobes. The wardrobes are very important in later missions, especially the accessories that go with the outfit. No functional value, mind you, but needed to impress the ladies.. uhhh, women... except Koko.

The reason why I'm explaining all of this is because the morons at Vivendi didn't bother including an instruction manual with the 4 game cds. It took me a long time to figure out how to change larry's clothes (third tab in Larry's Black Book: click on the outfit, and hit the escape button).

Overall, a very fun game. If you're incredibly skilled, you can come up with several different conversations in one mission.

Warnings: nudity (duh), profanity, artificial phallic flinging, art disappreciation (later level of Larry urinating on paintings at a gallery), and mind-numbing frustration, major flashbacks for those of us over 25.

It's worth the $30 for the pc version but I don't know about shelling $45 for the ps2 and xbox versions.

Have fun!

This game is of course a lot different from the old LSL games. I have all of the LSL games and I couldn't pass on the opportunity to have this one of course.

Adventure games died a couple of years back when Sierra (my favorite company in adventure games) decided they were going into action games and leaving adventure behind. This game cannot be called an adventure game as it was like the first LSL games.

This being said, I find the game pretty amusing. It's still in the same spirit that this loser tries as hard as he can to pick up girls. You can only feel sorry for him. The basis is still fun to play with. Like everyone else said, you hae to go through mini-games in order to advance in the game. That is why this is not an adventure game. This is no pick-up and use objects. You don't really need to think, you just need good hands.

The mini-games do sometimes get boring. There are variations of the same game but they all come down to 4 or 5 games overall. The one I like least is the conversations. Like someone already said, you have to play the game to be able to say intelligent things so you sometimes miss the conversation so much you are concentrated on the game. And you miss out on all the animation since you have to look at the game.

In spit of that, I think the game is still pretty fun. It brings back a lot of memories of the old LSL games and the fun I had with all the Sierra games. I would just hope that adventure could come back but the attention span of children today is so small that you cannot have adventure games like before where you have to think about what to do next...

P.S. With all the technology today, I would have thought that we would have Larry almost looking human and girls looking pretty good. In this game, even though you do see some nudity, it's still only animation and the girls don't look or feel real...

...but unfortunately, it turned into one of the biggest disappointments this year. The original Larry games were fun and witty in a genius way. I guess Sierra was afraid of creating a new adventure game. Instead, they created a bunch of retarded mini-games that you have to play over and over again. Argh!

There is fun to be had with this game. If you can get past the bad gameplay, you will actually encounter very funny details. Whether or not you make it there before getting completely pissed of is a different question. (And you should expect a much more simplistic sort of humor than in the original games...)

The problem with the mini games is that they are not just boring, repetitive, and dumb, but they also come with controls that are just plain bad. When you lose your 3rd trampoline bouncing game, just because the keyboard input is implemented badly, then I guarantee that you will hardly be motivated to see more digital boobies...

This is about the worst they could have done with this license. The recent months have been great for video games with huge leaps forward in terms of frustration-elimination and general quality. This game however is a huge step back in both departments. Probably the end of the larry-games for good...

The charm of the previous LSL games is completely gone. The "humor" is extremely lame, forget about the witty humor in the previous series.

Plus the way you advance is by playing minigames. This wouldn't be all that bad ( well it's nothing like the original where you are directly making decisions affecting the story) but you have to play the same mini games over and over and over again. And these are stupid games that can be programmed on a TI-83 calculator.

Biggest waste of money on a video game....

This isn't my LSL.. this is a cheap knockoff.

I'm 24 yrs old.

The old LSL games were a lot of fun--funny dialogue, light-hearted but interesting puzzles and games, and Al Lowe's contribution was unmistakable. This game is none of that. Very repetitive games involving your arrow keys (like the dancing video games at the arcade--left, left, right, up, down, enter, etc). Some of the dialogue was funny, but it is interminably long to get to it past the boring games. The cute commentary when you click on an item in the old games is gone, now the truest line is Larry's comment to 'remind the writers to write more dialogue' when you click on some items. All the cuteness and cleverness is gone from this game--if you want to see half-naked computerized graphics, this is your game, but if you're looking for a laugh, move on. Disappointed after a long wait that this is the end result.

I am having a lot of fun with this game.

It's full of raunchy humor, and funnier than many of the "teen comedies" that Hollywood had put out in recent years.

The "puzzle" gameplay of the original is gone, so this is probably more of an action game than an adventure game. Although the gameplay is repetitve, the story takes precedance over the gameplay, and you can even use abundant tokens to skip tough sequences whenever you want.

I've been playing the Xbox version of this game, but the PC version seems to be the version to get. The PC version is cheaper, and it's probaly more fun to cheat and unlock the additional nudity mode (a black censorship bar covers the bottoms of the girls who are frequently topless and/or having sex) and play that way from the start. Playstation 2 owners can also do that with cheats easier than X-box owners can.

Since the game is short, and gameplay isn't varied, some people are saying that this game is a rental, but that means that you'd have to play the console versions which have loading problems that the PC version doesn't have. Go ahead and buy this version for PC. It's a great value and delivers much more entertainment than, say, three genre DVDs.

I literally put down the great "Burnout 3: takedown" to play this game, and I'm not looking back.

Finally, the bonus disc that came with preorders of the game is totally useless, containing trailers and stuff that you can see on the web.

This is the first Larry game in years, and even though Larry's creator was not involved in this project, the overall 'feel' is the same. Sierra chose this time to make a major change in the gameplay and instead of the classic adventure, everything in the game is based on mini-games you have to play.

So, how is this game? Well, let me start first with the good things. The dialogues are absolutely hilarious. Graphics are excelent and most of the characters in the game look either really funny (big head Larry, for example) or really sexy (well, except when they are naked ...). Like in the old Larry games, the final goal is the same: you always get to have the girl in your bedroom, then - of course - something funny happens. Some of the situations are similar to other Larry games, but they still are funny enough to play. Heck, you almost pitty the little sucker for losing so many times. But, in the end he has his way: he has to choose between 3 girls (a cheerleader, a geek and a freak) and depending which one you choose, you get a hardcore ending (maybe too hardcore, if you choose the freak, but worth a laugh).

Now, for the bad part. In order to advance in this game, you have to win mini-games. There are no puzzles, no inventory per se, just solving same mini-games, over and over. Some of these mini-games are extremely hard, if not impossible to win. For example, you have to hit buttons in order (40 times in total) and can only make 5 mistakes. But the buttons change sometimes like 2-3 times per second, making it a 3 second mini-game. Other games are Tapper, Pong and others.

Fortunately though, you can always choose to 'wimp out' by using tokens you find everywhere in the game. Unless you plan to see all the girls you talked with naked in the game (uncle Larry will ask you for 269 tokens if you want that), then you should have plenty of tokens to avoid the frustration of these impossible games and pay the 5 tokens to move on. Towards the end of the game, this becomes a must, because of the insane difficulty.

If you want to get more tokens than you find, you can also go back to some segments you already played and play them again, for extra tokens. Unfortunately though, this adds to the whole 'not again?!' feeling that this game will give to you. After playing the same mini-game for 20 times, you will not be happy to see you have to play it again, in 5 minutes.

To this, should also be added that this game has the most unresponsive controls I have seen in quite a while. Some segments are impossible only because of the slow response time of the controls.

Overall, this game is a blast, if you use the tokens to avoid the frustration. The sexual situations are hilarious and same goes for the dialogues. Because there is zero replayability once you finish the game, I would not recommend buying it. With maybe 15 hours of gameplay, this could be a great rent for XBox or PS2.

I've enjoyed the quirky humor of previous Larry games, and I've followed them long enough that I've become nostalgic. So I was oddly happy to know that another Larry was coming along. This is a different Larry, because this is the first Larry that isn't a creation of Al Lowe. (Check out his web site at AlLowe.com). The absence of Lowe adds a political element to some of the commentary: Some people are of a mindset to dislike this game because they wanted Lowe to be a part of it. I think Lowe's participation would have been nice, but I'm willing to let the game speak for itself.

Bottom line is it satisfies me. It has the elements I've enjoyed in the earlier games and in life itself: The search for elusive satisfaction in a kooky world. It's raunchier than its predecessors but, like its predecessors, it's not a source of true erotic gratification. The game play consists of traipsing through the University and its surrounding community, bringing together the bits and pieces that move towards the greater goal of being a contestant on a dating show. Each element involves a short series of mini-games. There are 5 or 6 different types of mini-games, and they are repackaged for each encounter (for example, in the "service four lines" mini-game scenario, at one point you'll be passing out beer bottles to four lines of people in a bar, and later passing out fliers to four lines of people on the campus quad), and the repetition can become tedious. But if you persist, you'll either get better at these games, or alternatively you can spend "secret tokens" to "win" the current mini-game and move along. Meanwhile, there are many amusing details of the terrain to be explored and exploited.

There's an alternate version of this game, the "uncut and uncensored" package, that costs a few dollars more. I haven't seen it, and I've got mixed feelings about whether it's a good idea. On one hand, I'm curious; on the other hand, I don't expect gratification from a video game, so subtlety might be more effective. Sometimes less is more. And the standard game does grant you the ability to "buy" selective increases in the level of exposure by paying "secret tokens" to some of the shady characters who are found around the campus.

I'm glad Larry made it to the new millennium. If he shows up again, I'll buy that too.

Presumably it's not necessary to mention that Larry is for mature audiences only. Of course, if you were mature, you wouldn't be playing, would you?

"Mother's Against Video Game Violence" eh? And here I was convinced that Norman Bates killed his mom. I crack up when some self-important fool comes online and tells everybody what human nature is "supposed to be". We're all supposed to pass this game over because miss high-and-mighty mommie dearest is "against it". HA!

I belong to a group too. It's called "Adult Gamers Against Mothers Who Want Game Manufacturers To Do Their (bleep)ing Job For Them." Deal with it; games have ratings for a reason, the same as DVD's Films and TV shows- control your kids! Don't try to cut the grownups out of their fun because of your delicate sensibilities! Enough said.

This is a fun game *for young adults* who have the maturity to put this stuff in it's proper perspective. I don't think it's better than the O.G. Leisure Suit Larry-but I liked it and I think that people who are not familiar with the original LSL games will love it, so sorry mom-I guess you'll just have to tell your kids what they can and can't play until they are old enough to tell you where to get off.

I bet it will really tick her off to learn that "Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude Uncut and Uncensored", an Adults-Only-rated version of a game, (which is already for adults only), is available now. LOL.